He combines such disparate materials as bottle caps, printing plates, cassava graters, copper wiring, and sheet metal into both floor-based sculptures and shimmering wall pieces that sway and flex like cloth, despite their rigid composite materials. In transforming discarded objects into large-scale artworks, Ghanaian-born Anatsui explores the effects of human consumption on the environment and the fraught material and ideological relations between Africa and the Western world at large. Anatsui has exhibited in New York, London, Lagos, Barcelona, and Doha. He has participated in the Venice Biennale twice, once in 1990 and again in 2007, and received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. His work has achieved seven figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of African Art, and the British Museum, among others.

El Anatsui

In his sculptures and installations, El Anatsui transforms simple, everyday objects into grand, totemic assemblages.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/El_Anatsui_The_Collection_Content_Sheet_2024_CoverPS_Oi69QAW.pdf

Paper and Silver is made of paper, printed and hand-cut and hand-sculpted aluminium collage, and copper wire. In monochrome groupings of achromatic colors and strands of complex geometric scaffolding composed of vibrant red, yellow, gold, and blue, a dazzling array of formats and elements from the artist's bottle cap palette make up the composition of the artwork. Correspondingly varied in Paper and Silver is the aluminum collage; whereas the printed metal is flattened in some areas, it is folded and twisted and knotted in others.

Paper and Silver

ARTXX

Inkjet pigment print with irregular hand-cut edges conforming to the image, printed and hand-cut and hand-sculpted aluminum collage, and copper wire

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/El_Anatsui_The_Collection_Content_Sheet_2024_CoverPS_iaVgEgp.pdf

The composition of the Metal Cloth project was created specifically for it and does not exist in any other form. As is customary in so many of the artist’s internationally celebrated works of art, Metal Cloth engages in numerous dichotomous themes. Aesthetic boundaries are blurred, and often exceeded, as the variegated patterned imagery, which shares with Andy Warhol’s pop masterpieces of Marilyn Monroe from the 1960s a palette, appears to extend out in all directions. This connects the project to the “allover,” “polyphonic” approach that was championed by Clement Greenberg, whereas the monolithic rigidity of modernism’s grid is interrupted by amplified draping that goes across the surface of the piece from one side to the other.

Our El Anatsui Collection presented by Daphne

Metal Cloth

Hand-sculpted and formed UV cured acrylic resin inkjet on aluminum with irregular hand-cut edges and copper wire

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/El_Anatsui_The_Collection_Content_Sheet_2024_CoverPS.pdf

In his sculptures and installations, El Anatsui transforms simple, everyday objects into grand, totemic assemblages. He combines such disparate materials as bottle caps, printing plates, cassava graters, copper wiring, and sheet metal into both floor-based sculptures and shimmering wall pieces that sway and flex like cloth, despite their rigid composite materials. In transforming discarded objects into large-scale artworks, Ghanaian-born Anatsui explores the effects of human consumption on the environment and the fraught material and ideological relations between Africa and the Western world at large. Anatsui has exhibited in New York, London, Lagos, Barcelona, and Doha. He has participated in the Venice Biennale twice, once in 1990 and again in 2007, and received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. His work has achieved seven figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of African Art, and the British Museum, among others.

Gold Band

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/El_Anatsui_The_Collection_Content_Sheet_2024_CoverPS_k5gG2aq.pdf

El Anatsui’s Striped Flags is instilled with vibrancy, embodying Anatsui’s internationally acclaimed sculpture with its striking intricate composition incorporating a range of organic and geometric shapes, such as triangles, parallelograms and rectangles. These shapes, encapsulating bold colors - bright green, red, crimson, yellow etc. are occasionally filled with parallel or intersecting lines with scripts of multiple variations of typefaces. Although Striped Flags uses the grid format that is so common in minimalist art, the project also evokes analytical cubism. Made of paper, printed, hand cut and sculpted aluminium collage with copper wire.

Striped Flags

Inkjet pigment print with irregular hand-cut edges conforming to the image, printed and hand-cut and hand-sculpted aluminium collage, and copper wire.

JR is a photographer and artist whose identity is unconfirmed. After he found a camera in the Paris subway, he did a tour of European Street Art, tracking the people who communicate messages via the walls. Then, he started to work on the vertical limits, watching the people and the passage of life from the forbidden undergrounds and roofs of Paris. He has described himself as a "photograffeur", as he flyposts large black-and-white photographic images in public locations in a manner that is similar to the appropriation of the built environment by the graffiti artist. The artist exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. JR's work combines art and performance and its subject varies from commitment, freedom, identity and limitations. JR has exhibited his work at Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Watari-Um in Tokyo, Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, and Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

JR’s practice lies at the intersection of photography, street art, film, and social practice.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/JR_Giants_High_Jump_in_Rio_Content_sheet_PDF_Compressed_for_website.pdf

In his ongoing&nbsp;Giants series, JR takes over buildings&nbsp;and monuments&nbsp;across the globe, adorning them with massive&nbsp;black and white portraits.&nbsp;This artistic endeavor began in Rio de Janeiro during the 2016 Olympics,&nbsp;celebrating&nbsp;world-class&nbsp;athletes who narrowly missed achieving their goals. Among them is Mohamed, a Sudanese high-jumper whose image graces the rooftop of an abandoned apartment building overlooking the ocean.A groundbreaking sculpture captures this pivotal moment on a domestic scale. The figure is reproduced on acrylic and is attached to a scaffold constructed from welded steel rods.&nbsp;It can be displayed&nbsp;in isolation of placed on top of a&nbsp;custom-made pedestal, which also serves as display case.

GIANTS, High jump in Rio

Two-layer UV flatbed print on laser cut, hand-sanded 5mm frosted acrylic; welded steel rods on a laser cut steel base with a transparent powder coating; UV flatbed printed MDF box with metal hardware

An MFA graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, Refik Anadol (b. 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey) is internationally renowned for his visual simulations, which he calls “data sculptures” or “data paintings.” To create these mesmerizing, often immersive moving images, he trains machines to process and transform a wide array of real-world data sets such as wind patterns, Bluetooth signals, or, as in Quantum Memories (2020) —shown at the 2020 NGV Triennial in Melbourne —200 million images of nature. For Anadol, data is a pigment and machines are human collaborators, capable of hallucinating new and vivid impressions of reality. He continues to push the boundaries of art and technology with his eponymous studio and research initiative RAS LAB in Los Angeles.

Refik Anadol

The award-winning New Media artist Refik Anadol explores the potential of artificial intelligence, using machine-learning algorithms to transform vast datasets into highly sensory aesthetic experiences.

In physics, quantum noise refers to the noise of uncertainty arising from random fluctuations in a system. Tapping into these random fluctuations as a unique realm of possibilities and predictions, Refik Anadol’s QUANTUM MEMORIES: NOISE series uses Google Quantum AI’s most cutting-edge, publicly available quantum computation research data and algorithms to explore the possibility of a parallel world. For this project RAS developed a custom procedural coherent noise implementation by utilizing beyond classical measurements for computing surflets. These data and algorithms allow Anadol to speculate alternative modalities inside the most sophisticated computer available, and create new quantum noise-generated datasets as building blocks of these modalities. The piece is both inspired by and a speculation of the many-worlds interpretation in quantum physics – a theory that holds that there are many parallel worlds that exist at the same space and time as our own.

Quantum Memories: Noise B

C-print

Yves Klein (1928–1962) was born in Nice, France, to an artistic family. Although Klein grew up in a creative household, he received no formal artistic training. His major artistic breakthrough came in 1947 while lying on the beach with two friends; they divided the universe between themselves. He possessed the ethereal space surrounding the planet and decided that the blue sky would be his first artwork. In the mid-1950s he then began to exhibit his monochrome paintings in which a canvas was uniformly covered in a single colour. His short career was characterised by many radical gestures. Yves Klein´s “Leap Into the Void” presents the artist soaring upwards from the parapet of a building like a Left Bank Superman. In 1958, he attracted attention with an “Exhibition of emptiness”, an empty gallery space in Paris painted white, titled The Void. In his search for colours, he developed – together with chemists and the French pharmaceutical company, Rhône Poulenc – the patented colour ‘International Yves Klein Blue’ (IKB). Between his oeuvre, Yves Klein´s table, a caffee table filled with IKB pigments, is one of the most iconic contemporary artworks. Moreover, Yves Klein´s art influenced minimal, conceptual and performance art by taking the painting out of the frame and blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Yves Klein´s Atropometries are impressions of naked female models smothered in paint, kind of “living brushes”. Using this strategy allowed him to depersonalise the art object. Klein was a pioneer in the development of Performance art, and he is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal art, as well as Pop art.

Yves Klein

Yves Klein is famous for his explorations into pure color—blue in particular. Employing only his signature, patented pigment, International Klein Blue, the artist made iconic monochromes that aimed to bring art into the realm of pure, atmospheric feeling.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Yves_Klein_LOurs_Pompon_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2023.pdf

100 years after François Pompon’s success at the&nbsp;Salon d’Automne, the artist’s iconic&nbsp;White Bear meets Yves Klein’s&nbsp;Blue, converging in what is known as&nbsp;L’Ours Pompon. This production is the result of a meticulous collaboration between Yves Klein &amp; François Pompon Estates. The handmade resin sculpture is made from Pompon's original mold with Blue Klein finishing and positioned in an acryl display case.In 1962, the year marking his death, Yves Klein recreated universally cherished masterpieces using his distinctive&nbsp;International Klein Blue: the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Michelangelo’s Dying Slave. From 1982 to 1992, these sculptures were produced and are now enthusiastically sought after by collectors worldwide. In 2022&nbsp;Artémus Éditions, an art publisher with a fervent admiration for Klein’s work, suggested to the Yves Klein Foundation the application of the renowned&nbsp;IKB onto an equally iconic masterpiece:&nbsp;The Polar Bear by&nbsp;François Pompon.&nbsp;While the sculpture captures the essence of form, the colour encapsulates an essence of its own, in a broader sense, the essence of art. The meticulous standards upheld by the foundations responsible for safeguarding the artists’ reputation have guided the entirety of the production process and achieved a museal result.

L'Ours Pompon

Handmade Resin with IKB Finishing

The Chinese artist is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists in the East and West, a global citizen who calls for political investigation within his wide practice. Ai Weiwei investigates and questions institutions and regimes at the core of his work, he measures our existence in relation to economic, political, and social forces, while his practice is rooted in Chinese tradition he executes within a contemporary and conceptual creativity.

His provocative blend of Chinese tradition and craftsmanship within fully contemporary practice serves his strong criticism of human rights violations and condemnations of governmental corruption. His own life since childhood has been marked by his struggles and fights against the Chinese Government. His father, a renewed poet, was declared “class enemy” and sent to labor camp with his family. Migrating to New York was his opportunity to expand his artistic vocabularies where he stayed for over a decade. During this time, he became influenced by the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Hasper Johns.
He was secretly detained without any official charges being filed for 81 days from April 3 to June 22, 2011 by the Chinese government, and his passport was held for 4 years afterward. Since being allowed to leave China in 2015 he has produced monumental installations and artworks that advocate for refugee rights and make awareness on the global crisis of displacement.

Ai Weiwei

Dissident artist Ai Weiwei is famous for conceptual artworks that challenge authority and explore the links between the contemporary world and traditional Chinese culture.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Ai_Weiwei_Papercuts__Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2024_compressed.pdf

In his "Papercut" Portfolio of 8 Prints, Ai Weiwei reflects on his life and work through the Chinese art of papercutting. Each of the eight pieces is meticulously cut in large-format, brightly red-colored fine-art paper, representing a turning moment within the artist’s iconic oeuvre: from his permanence in New York in the ’80s, his exploration of the traditional Chinese crafts in Beijing in the ’90s, to the political activism of his most recent production


Each papercut is signed by the artist and collected in a portfolio accompanied by explanatory notes by Chin-Chin Yap, who has extensively worked with Ai Weiwei, most recently as a writer and co-producer on several films. Through these eight pieces, the artist offers a beautiful, personal retrospective in a unique format.

The Papercut Portfolio

Papercuts in clothbound clamshell box (Portfolio of 8)

The street artist and photographer JR started out his artist practice in the streets of Paris. Using the pseudonym JR, the artist is keeping his identity hidden from the public.

La Ferita (The Wound) imagines the Palazzo Strozzi with a deep gash revealing the interior of the Renaissance building with some of Florence’s most iconic artworks occupying the space. Measuring 28 metres tall and 33 metres wide, the monumental photographic collage installation covers the primary façade of the Palazzo Strozzi and works like an anamorphosis, an illusion in which, observed from a specific viewpoint, various areas of the Palazzo Strozzi – the colonnade in the courtyard, an imaginary exhibition hall and a library – open up as a wound.
By including iconic works of Florence’s art heritage and directly citing real places such as the library of the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, JR proposes a direct and evocative reflection on accessibility not only to Palazzo Strozzi but to all cultural sites in the era of Covid-19.

Palazzo Strozzi becomes the spectacular stage for a symbolic yet painful wound suffered by all cultural institutions both in Italy and abroad: museums, libraries, cinemas and theatres forced either to restrict audience access or to shut down altogether. Looking « inside » Palazzo Strozzi also has the makings of an act of voyeurism designed to reveal that which cannot be seen: the depiction of a reality that goes beyond what one can customarily behold.

La Ferita, 25 Mars 2021, 19H07, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italie

14 colors lithograph printed on Marinoni machine on white paper BFK Rives - 300 grammes

Donald Sultan (USA, born 1951) is a distinguished painter, sculptor, and printmaker, who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the New Yorker “New Image” movement. He has a unique artistic method and innovative approach to traditional subject matter. Known as Abstract Representation, Donald Sultan´s art is characterized by the use of geometric black forms set against organic areas of bright color, thus bringing an abstract sensibility to his iconographic images of still life. Throughout his career he has revisited and reinvented still life, using images of lemons, poppies, playing cards, fruits, flowers, and other objects. Donald Sultan’s Lemons, a recurrent theme in his artworks, has, in fact, become an iconic image all over the world. Sultan is considered to be at the forefront of contemporary art. Although his paintings are often classified as landscapes and still life, Sultan states that they are first and foremost abstracts. Besides paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he has created many editions. Donald Sultan’s prints are unique: he uses specific materials like “flocking’s” to create expressive and powerful prints that are reminiscent of his forceful paintings. Since his first solo exhibition in 1977, Sultan’s artistic career has progressed rapidly; his works are part of the most prominent public and private collections to be found across the globe.

Donald Sultan

Donald Sultan’s large-scale still-life paintings feature semi-abstract compositions and unique materials: The artist has used tar, spackle, enamel, Masonite, and vinyl floor tiles to create his minimalist renderings of flowers, fruits, and other natural forms.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Donald_Sultan_Blue_Poppies_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2023.pdf

"Blue Poppies" is a sculpture of painted aluminum on polished aluminum base, belonging to Sultan’s famous Flower series. The artist is credited for the revival of the still life tradition where the image is deconstructed to the basic elements, thus Sultan’s work remains both abstract and representational.

Sultan has revisited and reinvented the still-life with images of lemons, poppies, playing cards, fruits and flowers, and other objects. Interested in contrast, he explores such dichotomies as beauty and roughness, nature and artificiality, and realism and abstraction. His floral bouquets, fruit still lifes and landscapes fill with an impressive monumentality the space.

Blue Poppies

Painted Aluminum on Polished Aluminum Base

Collin Sekajugo was born in Masaka, Uganda. He is a multimedia art practitioner whose art is rooted in his deep sense of empathy for the human condition. Collin Sekajugo approaches his work from a distinct, aesthetic departure point that resides in his repeated return to pop culture and the omnipresent influence exuded by the global mainstream, conversing and critiquing its many biases across visual, oral and digital cultures. Sekajugo’s artistic practice highlights a contemporaneous anthropological reversal of this mainstream culture through the lens of a decidedly African sense for irreverence and play on the ad-hoc. 
Along Acaye Kerunen, Collin Sekajugo was chosen to be one of the firsts artist to represent his country in the first ever Ugandan pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

Collin Sekajugo

Ugandan-Rwandan Collin Sekajugo’s artistic practice examines and questions the notion of personal identity in a self-absorbed contemporaneity by re-imagining subjects from visual, oral and digital culture.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Collin_Sekajugo_Smiling_Girl_Eating_Salad_2021_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2024_compressed.pdf

Ugandan-Rwandan Collin Sekajugo’s artistic practice examines and questions the notion of personal identity in a self-absorbed contemporaneity by re-imagining subjects from visual, oral and digital culture. Sekajugo named this approach “Sekadaidentism”, which is a combination of “Sekajugo” and the word “identity”. Since 2012, Sekajugo has worked with the manipulation of stock images – generic images created for creative or business purposes – to reveal their inherent biases of entitlement and privilege largely modelled on the Western self. By doing so, Sekajugo highlights a contemporaneous anthropological reversal of this mainstream culture through the lens of a decidedly African sense for irreverence and play on the ad-hoc. 
With "Stock Image 012 – Smiling Girl Eating Salad", Sekajugo represents a stunning engagement with portraiture that utilises contextual materials to great effect. The barkcloth and acrylic gilds each canvas to begin from another foundation, while their titles link them into spheres of digital and historical reproduction. Conceptually, the works of Sekajugo are purely theatrical: they take over and re-invent identities in order to exposes some truths behind these stock images that quietly continue to colonise the entire globe by the weight of their own popularity.
Sekajugo created "Stock Image 012 – Smiling Girl Eating Salad"  as part of a series made exclusively for the 59th Venice Biennale. It is currently exhibited in the first ever Ugandan pavilion of the renown international art exhibition.
Note: The artwork will be offered framed.

Stock Image 012 – Smiling Girl Eating Salad

3D-print, silicon on canvas, mounted on Dibond

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist based in Berlin. Confronting fundamental human concerns such as life, death, and relationships. A former student of Marina Abramovic, Shiota explores human existence throughout various dimensions by creating an existence in the absence either in her large-scale thread installations that include a variety of common through her drawings, sculptures, photography and videos. 

Shiota gained international fame, when she represented Japan in 2015 at the Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand. The installation made of dangling 50,000 metal keys, collected from around the world, bound together in a colossal red web hovering above two wooden boat offered a collective metaphor for the distillation of individual experiences into collective memory. The manifestation of Shiota’s emotions and interior battles, truths and memories that are at once personal and collective makes her oeuvre is very intimate but also universal.

Chiharu Shiota

Best known for her delicate, mixed-media web-like composition combined with everyday items, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s oeuvre, explores fundamental human concerns such as life, death and relationships.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Chiharu_Shiota_I_Hope_2021_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2024.pdf

The Berlin-based, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota is best known for creating immersive thread installations that surround the public like a mental space. The former student of Marina Abramovic, explores and confronts fundamental human concerns such as life death and relationship, by manifesting her emotions and interior battles, truths and memories that are at once personal and collective. Shiota’s oeuvre is very intimate yet also universal.

During the Covid-19 pandemic the world has experienced innumerable complications and the word “hope” is something that we all became familiar with.

Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota sought to create a space that would remind and inspire us to believe again. For her exhibition at Berlin’s König Galerie, she created an immersive installation titled I hope... The piece subsumes 10,000 letters that were sent to her from people around the globe, sharing their hopes for the future. The correspondence was then interconnected by hundreds of various lengths of scarlet thread hanging suspended in the air.

I Hope... 2021 is inspired by the lamp designed by a German industrial designer Ingo Mauer.

I HOPE...

Stainless steel, heat-resistant satin glass, transparent Din A5 sheets

One of the most renowned contemporary artists, Peter Doig, who was born in 1959, in Scotland, was the central figure in the revival of painting in the contemporary art scene during the '90s. At present his oneiric landscapes are highly sought after by world-leading collectors and museums.

After a childhood spent in Trinidad and Canada, Doig only returned to Great Britain at the age of twenty in order to study art. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, which cemented his public recognition. Themes of magical realism are recurrent through Peter Doig’s paintings, capturing timeless moments of perfect tranquillity. Doig´s dreamlike depictions are often scattered with ghostly human traces in a sensuous palette.

Many of Doig's artworks are depicting landscapes, layered formally and conceptually, somewhat abstract, with a number harking back to the snowy scenes of his childhood lived in Canada. While his works are frequently based on found images (photographs, newspaper clippings, movie scenes, record album covers), they are not painted in a photorealistic. Doig instead uses the photographs simply for reference.
The canoes have become an inspiring image throughout his work; their reflection in the water is a fantasy mirror to the unknown. This inventive style, sensuous palette, and suggestive imagery are also maintained in Peter Doig’s prints through the mastery use of different printmaking techniques. Peter Doig is one of a number of pioneering contemporary figurative artists, and recent major solo exhibitions have been staged at institutional venues, including Fondation Beyeler, Basel; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal; Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and Tate Britain, London. His auction record on the painting Rosedale, created in 1991 sold for over $28 million at Phillips New York in May 2017.

Art critic Jonathan Jones said about Doig: "Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity."

Peter Doig

Peter Doig’s serene, fantastical paintings feature kaleidoscope landscapes punctuated by enigmatic, partially obscured figures.

An avid winter sportsman, Peter Doig lived in Zermatt for six weeks in 2020 and for four months in 2021, working out of a studio on the mountain. With his inventive, painterly approach, the artist uses alpine imagery and traditional printmaking techniques to investigate landscape, material, and form. These diverse series of etchings reflects a self-referential process of experiment and innovation in which works continuously evolve into their final form. Together, this body of work pays homage to Doig’s passion for skiing and connection to Zermatt, while also referencing a rich tradition of alpine paintings in Western art that began in the 15th century and was carried forward by masters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Emil Nolde, and Ferdinand Holder.

Gornegrat Sahara Dust

Etching in two colors, aquatint, spitbite

Jeff Koons (born 1955) playfully tests the boundaries of commerce, celebrity, banality, and pleasure. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. Koons turns banal commercial or everyday objects into art icons by using seductive materials, a shift of scale, and a contextual displacement. Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” (featuring his enormous iconic chromium stainless steel dogs); his large-scale vinyl “Inflatables”; or the giant “Split-Rocker” all follow this principle. For instance, Jeff Koons in “Puppy” engaged the past and the present, referencing the eighteenth-century formal garden, while adding the most sugary of iconography. Originally licensed as a commodities broker, Koons decided to become an artist in the late 1970s and moved from Wall Street into a factory-like studio in SoHo with hundreds of assistants. Since then, he has produced different iconic series, like the “Pre-New”, a series of domestic objects in strange new configurations, and “The Equilibrium” series, consisting of basketballs floating in distilled water tanks. The “Banality” series, which includes Jeff Koons´s “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” and “Woman in Tub”, among others, is characterized by oddly eroticized, comic, and kitsch images. However, it is indeed Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series that is his most provocative and controversial work, in which he examines the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, ready-made and art objects, by decontextualizing his objects and lifting them to iconic status. Jeff Koons´s art is the result of his intention to bring it out of the enclave of the genius-driven artist into the realms of contemporary pop and commerce-driven culture.

Jeff Koons

One of the most famous artists working today, Jeff Koons makes gleeful, tongue-in-cheek sculptures, paintings, and installations that border—and often cross—the edge of good taste.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Jeff_Koons_The_Diamonds_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2023.pdf

With the&nbsp;Celebration series, Koons offers a reimagined iconography of the gemstone found in nature, which takes billions of years to form, in a brand new colour. The Diamond becomes a vehicle for the artist to communicate and reflect upon&nbsp;consumerism and&nbsp;mass production&nbsp;specifically related to festivities.Similarly to the original and monumental sculpture of the Diamond (1994-2005), measuring more than 2 metres wide and created in five unique colour versions, the porcelain sculpture shown here shares a highly polished chromium surface that reflects light and that mirrors its surroundings.The&nbsp;Diamond (Blue) is now available on Weng Contemporary and can be purchased as a&nbsp;single piece or together with&nbsp;Diamond (Red)&nbsp;in a&nbsp;set&nbsp;with&nbsp;matching edition numbers.&nbsp;

Diamond (Blue)

French Limoges porcelain with chromatic coating

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist born in Glasgow in 1966.

Having begun his career as a performance artist, he has later embraced a variety of different mediums and disciplines. The result is a diverse body of works, which has grown to include video, sound photographic objects and texts aimed at teasing viewers’ perceptions, memories and expectations.

After winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 1996, Gordon represented Great Britain at the 1997 Venice Biennale. One year later, in 1998, he won the Hugo Boss Prize, awarded annually by the Guggenheim Museum to an exceptional emerging or mid-career artist. Whether in the form of film, performance, video installation, sculpture, photography, or conceptual text, his production explores such themes as time, identity, self-image, and mortality, as well as darkness, power, collective memory, or morality. Using literature, folklore, and iconic Hollywood films in addition to his own footage, drawings, and writings, he distorts time and language in order to disorient and challenge.

Douglas Gordon

Throughout his diverse practice—spanning photography, video, performance, sound, and text-based work—Douglas Gordon recontextualizes familiar images and artworks, distorting time, language, and other aesthetic aspects to challenge viewers’ perception, expectation, and memory.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/UPDATED_Douglas_Gordon_Marily_Elvis_Content_Sheet_2024_1_tXEfSVK.pdf

Icons of the artist’s oeuvre are his Self-Portraits, where Gordon uses real flames to erode Hollywood paradigmatic figures, such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and James Dean. The fire corrodes specific elements of the represented characters, such as the eyes, noses and mouths. The remain untouched parts are then assembled on reflective, mirror-like surfaces, which denote Gordon’s interest in phenomenological experiences. The resulting surfaces details are the most compelling elements of these editions, where solidified drops meet the burnt areas, in a ambiguous encounter of elements. In an interview given to The Talks, Gordon jokingly admitted that he set his jeans on fire by accident during one of these burning sessions at Gagosian's in New York.

Portrait of a Self Portrait of a Self, as Marilyn

Print on canvas, inner frame, Dibond backplate

Conceptual art pioneer Wang Guangle was born in 1976 and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he started exploring the potential of texture and painting surfaces, which later translated into his minimalist monochrome painting practice.The artist has gained public recognition for his process-based paintings, which simultaneously reference traditional memento mori, temporality, repetition and abstraction, all evident in his works as tangible experiences.Wang Guangle has been awarded several prestigious prizes, such as the Montblanc Artist Award in 2015 and the China Artist of the Year Award in 2016. He also participated in many national and international exhibitions, including the Venice and Lyon Biennales.His works are part of permanent collections of several museums and institutions, and were presented in solo shows worldwide, in London and New York at Pace Gallery, Beijing at Beijing Commune, and in Taipei at Soka Art Centre among others.

Wang Guangle

Conceptual art pioneer Wang Guangle was born in 1976 and studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where he started exploring the potential of texture and painting surfaces, which later translated into his minimalist monochrome painting practice.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Wang_Guangle_221215_Content_Sheet_2024_New_Branding.pdf

In 221215, Guangle applied each layer of paint starting from the canvas’ far edges towards its center, creating a subtle gradation of colour and the effect of an illuminated window radiating from within. The repetitive layering of acrylic paint allows the viewer to notice and embrace the materiality of the medium and embodies the movement of the passage of time.As a result of the state-of-the-art Hi-Rnd© Technology used to produce 221215, this artwork offers the same exact texture effect as the unique original painting created by the artist.Starting in 2003, as a founding member of the N12 artist group, Guangle promoted a break from traditional representational paintings toward individual expression. By playing with depth and surface, the artist managed to give his paintings a mesmerising illusion effect.

221215

High-rendered print on canvas

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Damien Hirst's The Beautiful Paintings Collection

"The inauguration of the showroom marks the beginning of a new era for Weng Contemporary, as it stands as a symbol of openness and encounter between people and art."

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